- Oct 15, 2016
- 837
- 1,291
I'd argue against this.
Think again about what is the emergent theme of the game and also what is the core mechanic.
To me the theme of the game was all about discovery - the setting of a spaceship, the engine issues, the corruption mechanics, even the wine quest all built into it. You are on a journey of discovery both in terms of the plot and the literal game.
The core mechanic fed into this as it's essentially an exploration game. You have to explore the ship and the character choices at certain times of the day to ensure that you can complete your quests and get your rewards. There's not many dead ends in the writing that will cut you off, so it's less of a puzzle/character driven game and more about reading the hints in the dialogue or using your common sense to find the next progression point.
Now your mechanic ties perfectly into your overall theme - you explore to discover. That's great.
However, as with every new feature in the game you should consider how it would affect the mechanics and theme in terms of whether it would add to them or take away from them. A map system with specific times seems to actually detract from your theme rather than add to it. It makes the game more on rails if you know already where everybody is; the discovery of finding their routines and the memorisation of it is a pretty major part of the playthrough.
In my opinion you should be looking at games like Skyrim and how it is designed in order to see if it makes sense. Now Skyrim has a map function and a waypoint system because it has such a massive world which would be frustrating for the player to learn without. But more importantly, the waypoints act as a guide to exploration rather than a restriction of them - most players are expected to then walk across the open world to a new area and along the way you'll find quests and events.
The game you've built so far is very tightly contained in terms of real estate; just travelling from one room to the next doesn't give you much ability to explore somewhere new because it's not the world itself that you're building your exploration around but instead the items, characters and content within that world.
A map would remove a part of your game that it relies on for its playability. It would make it much more linear in playthrough as if you give the player the opportunity to be lazy, especially in adult games where the quest progression is pretty much the reward system, they'll take that 100 times out of 100.
I'd suggest only implementing a map once you flesh out enough characters or worldspace to justify it and I don't think it's a necessary addition.
